This Sunday Atlas Obscura hosted a cemetery symbolism walking tour at Greenwood in Brooklyn. Allison, our tour guide, carries a wealth of knowledge about one of my favorite places in the world, and I highly recommend jumping on her next Greenwood tour. We learned all about the monument of the horrible Brooklyn theater fire, under which the charred remains of an unknown number rest, and about the meaning of inverted torches, hands, shrouds, anchors, and many other headstone symbols.
We walked around the cemetery to tales of rich guy mausoleums, Egyptian pyramid tombs with Christian symbolism, public lots, Civil War battles, poisonous zinc monuments, family plot fences melted down for metal during the war, the meaning of different hedges and shrubs, and the history of Greenwood itself until we were so cold our toes were numb.

I was on hand to take photos for AO, here are a few of my favorites. The rest can be seen at Atlas Obscura's Flickr.